Florence Museums

If you came for painting

The Uffizi first and it is not close: Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera, Leonardo's Annunciation, Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, Titian's Venus of Urbino and three Caravaggios in one building, with a reserved entry from €16. Allow two hours for the highlights and three to four to see it properly.

The Pitti Palace is the second, and it is the one people underrate. The Palatine Gallery hangs over five hundred paintings salon-style, frames touching, the way a grand-ducal collection was actually displayed — Raphael's Madonna of the Chair among them, with the palace and Boboli ticket from €35. If the Uffizi felt like a queue, the Pitti will not.

If you came for sculpture

The Accademia for David and the four unfinished Prisoners, and the Bargello for everything else: Donatello's bronze David, his marble one, Michelangelo's Bacchus and Pitti Tondo, and the two competition panels Ghiberti and Brunelleschi submitted for the Baptistery doors in 1401, hung facing each other.

A €26 combined ticket from the museums covers both for 48 hours. Add the Medici Chapels, reserved entry from €18, for Michelangelo's New Sacristy, and the Opera del Duomo Museum, which holds the sculpture taken off the cathedral for safekeeping — Donatello's gaunt Magdalene, Michelangelo's Bandini Pietà and the original Gates of Paradise.

If you came for the Medici

Three buildings in order of when the family lived in them: Palazzo Medici Riccardi, which they built and where Gozzoli painted the Chapel of the Magi; Palazzo Vecchio, which Cosimo I took over as a residence in 1540 and covered in Vasari's propaganda; and the Pitti Palace, which they bought in 1549 and never left. The Medici Chapels are where they end up. One caution for the first of those: the entrance moved to Via de' Ginori 2 on 27 August 2026, and the Chapel of the Magi admits ten people at a time for five minutes.

If you came for something other than art

Museo Galileo, from €17, on the Arno two minutes from the Uffizi. It holds the only two telescopes Galileo built that survive, the lens through which he found Jupiter's moons, and the middle finger of his right hand. It is also open on Mondays and shuts at 13:00 on Tuesdays, which is the one hours trap on this whole page.

Or Palazzo Strozzi, whose temporary exhibitions run to 20:00 daily and 23:00 on Thursdays and are the only museum evening in Florence. Broken: The Power of the Fragment opens on 25 September 2026 and runs to 24 January 2027.

Nine of these fifteen open at either 08:15 or 09:00, which is why an early start buys so much in Florence. Hours are as published by each museum. Last admission is normally between forty minutes and an hour before closing, and every ticket desk shuts before the doors do.

Only four of the fifteen publish a recommended visit length, which is why most of that last column says so. Where the museum is silent we give our own routing and label it as ours — it is the pace this site uses to build the one-day, two-day and three-day plans, and it assumes you stop for the things you like and walk past the rest.

The split is administrative rather than logical. Museums run by the state close on Mondays; museums run by the Comune di Firenze, by church foundations or by private institutions do not, and the Opera del Duomo runs its monuments seven days a week.

So a Monday in Florence is not a lost day, it is a different day — and it is the day to do the things a normal itinerary defers. The full Monday list — which doors are open, at what hours, and a plan built around them — is on what opens on a Monday.

• Closed on Mondays: the Uffizi, the Accademia, the Pitti Palace, the Bargello, the Medici Chapels and Orsanmichele.
• Boboli is the odd one: open every Monday except the first and last of the month.
• Open on Mondays: Palazzo Vecchio 09:00–19:00, Museo Galileo 09:30–18:00, Santa Croce, Santa Maria Novella, the Brancacci Chapel, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Museo Novecento and Palazzo Strozzi.
• Open every day: the whole Duomo complex — dome, bell tower, Baptistery, museum and Santa Reparata on the three passes — with only the museum taking the first Tuesday of the month off.
• The other weekday traps, since they catch people improvising: the Brancacci Chapel closes on Tuesdays, the Museo Novecento on Thursdays, Palazzo Medici Riccardi on Wednesdays, and Palazzo Vecchio shuts at 14:00 every Thursday.

The state museums are free on the first Sunday of every month under the national domenicalmuseo rule. That means the Uffizi, the Accademia, the Pitti, Boboli, the Bargello, the Medici Chapels and Orsanmichele, with no reservation possible and the ticket issued at the gate. The queues on those mornings are the longest of the month, and no ticket you already hold moves you up them. If the free Sunday is your only day, be in the line before 08:00; if it is not, spend it somewhere else.

The Bargello and the Medici Chapels are also free on 25 April and 4 November, and the Accademia adds 2 June to that list for 2026. Santa Croce runs its own free dates in 2026 — 15 August, 14 September, 26 and 27 September, 4 October, 8 November, 20 December and 26 December — with no online booking and last entry at 16:30.

What never goes free is the Duomo complex. The three Opera del Duomo passes have no free days at all, and the cathedral nave is the exception that proves it: free every day it is open to visitors, Monday to Saturday 10:15–15:45, with no ticket and no booking. The civic museums — Palazzo Vecchio, Novecento, Brancacci — publish no free days.

• Always free, no ticket: the cathedral nave, San Miniato al Monte, the Mercato Centrale building, Piazzale Michelangelo, Piazza della Signoria and the Loggia dei Lanzi — the full attractions list marks them.
• Always free by category: under-18s of any nationality at the state museums, with ID. EU citizens aged 18 to 25 pay a reduced rate.
• Free with a Firenze Card: family members under 18 linked to an adult's card.

Florence sells several museum passes and none of them covers the Duomo. Prices from our listing where we sell the pass, and from firenzecard.it and bargellomusei.it where we do not. The last column says when each pass earns its place.

Two things to know before you buy the €85 card. It excludes the whole Duomo complex — the Opera del Duomo does not appear on any of the six pages of the card's museum list — so the Duomo pass sits on top of it whatever you do. And a reservation remains obligatory at the Uffizi, the Accademia and Palazzo Vecchio even for cardholders, so the phone calls do not go away; it buys the entry, not the slot.

There is a €28 restart that adds 48 hours to an expired card, digital only, from 1 March 2026. The Firenze Card page has the full list and the break-even arithmetic. Casa Martelli, one of the six museums on the GAMB ticket, is closed until 31 December 2026, which makes that pass a five-museum ticket in practice.

And the Vasari Corridor is not a pass at all: it is sold with an Uffizi ticket or a guided Uffizi tour, or as a Friday-evening corridor-only visit, and the Vasari Corridor page has both. A guided Uffizi tour is one of the ways into the corridor, and the Florence guided tours page sorts the options worth comparing.

Two museums in Florence have a real scarcity problem. At the rest, a reserved ticket fixes the hour you want rather than rescuing the day.

Each museum's own page here carries its doors and its rules in full, and what to see in Florence puts them in the order a visit actually takes them.

• Book weeks ahead: the Uffizi, whose first slots go a fortnight ahead in April, May, September and October, and the Accademia, which warns in its own words that without a reservation the wait for access may be long. The timed Uffizi entry and the Accademia entry with audio app both cancel free up to 24 hours before.
• Book a few days ahead if you want a specific hour: Palazzo Vecchio's Torre di Arnolfo and Secret Passages, which cap group sizes; Palazzo Medici Riccardi, whose online ticket is a dated, timed, non-refundable slot; and the Vasari Corridor, whose reservation is mandatory and nominative.
• Book ahead because it is capped: the Brancacci Chapel, ten people per thirty-minute visit, where the museum itself strongly recommends booking. The Oltrarno page carries the ticket with audio guide.
• Rarely sold out: the Bargello, the Medici Chapels, the Pitti and Boboli, Santa Croce, Santa Maria Novella, Museo Galileo and Palazzo Strozzi. A reserved Bargello entry or a reserved Medici Chapels entry fixes a time.